EEQUIVALENTSS

Daily Instagram project

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As an homage to Alfred Stieglitz, the father of modern photography and creator of the renowned series of cloud pictures he first titled Songs of the Sky and later came to call Equivalents, I created a project-specific Instagram account in which I photographed and posted a picture of the sky nearly every day for an entire year.

Just as Steiglitz’s cloud pictures were imbued with a symbolist aesthetic, and over time became increasingly abstract equivalents of his own experiences, thoughts, and emotions, so too did my pictures assume symbolic weight and personal meaning as the year passed. Shortly after beginning the project on the Spring 2015 Equinox, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the act of making these images quickly took on a kind of liturgical significance. Each picture became a brief meditation, a prayer, for mom as I marked the passage of another day and considered the nuances of light, space, form and texture overhead. The series includes images made on the day she was diagnosed and the days we spent together at home and in the hospital. They mark the day she died, the day she was buried, and the difficult days that followed.